November 9, 2011

Last year when my neighbours were building their new house, they gave us rounds of wood from the Douglas-fir and birch trees they had cut down to make room. We lugged the heavy rounds over the fence and across the yard, and they have been sitting piled in a corner every since. Most of them were full of knots from heavy branches.

Yesterday, we rented a log splitter and transformed the massive chunks into firewood. It took about 2.5 hours to turn nearly 100 rounds into about a cord and a half of fir and birch firewood for the woodstove.

I was shocked at how easy the work was with the splitter. I didn't even know that splitters existed until recently. The same work would have taken days or weeks to do by hand.

It made me think about where else this shows up in life. What tools are out there that could make your work easier or faster? Are you using them? Each of us has a finite number of hours in our day. It is good to think about the most effective way to spend our time.

It is also useful to think about what's out there that you may not yet know about. Others have likely developed tools or approaches that could help you to get the work done more efficiently. Finding ways to plug ourselves into the collective intelligence of us all just makes sense.